Crescent City blues

Katrina happened like that. As with everything else in the city, the storm brought to a halt production of the New Orleans Review. Among the better of the literary journals in the country, the NOR regularly had work reprinted in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Anthology, Poetry Daily and the Utne Reader. Katrina scattered the staff to Baton Rouge, Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., Washington and Boston. Some have left New Orleans for good.

Chambers says, "In the first few weeks after, I can't say that I gave the magazine a thought. I spent my days sitting stunned in front of CNN for hours on end, drinking steadily, and searching the Internet for news of friends and colleagues. I remember the dates I returned to the city: September 15, October 2, October 30. Otherwise those months are a blur. At some point, late September I guess, I started to think about how New Orleans Review could respond to this unfolding disaster. Everywhere I turned ... people were writing about New Orleans. Much of it was good and accurate, but there was also a lot of bullshit written by people who did not really know or understand the place. It occurred to me that now was the time for the magazine to publish an issue on New Orleans, by New Orleans writers. By this time, my wife and I had moved into a tiny ramshackle garage apartment in Houston. I compiled a list of all the local writers I could find, sent out a call for submissions, asked them to forward it around.

"I began receiving submissions immediately. My vision for this issue was that it would be a celebration of New Orleans, a chance for the writers and poets of the city to respond to the disaster. And I saw it as an elegy, for I knew by this point that the New Orleans I had left no longer existed, and that though the city might survive, it would never be the same. In March, there were already a slew of New Orleans and Katrina books in the stores. There must have been people signing book contracts before the waters receded. I feel we had a little more critical distance, and were able to put together something that was more thoughtful and coherent." The post-Katrina half of the issue looks at how the storm hurt the city, and how seeing the injured city hurt its people. It's imagistic and visceral, and of special note are the nine photographs by David Rae Morris that range from an accounting of the graffiti that blossomed in the flooded city, from both an official "Possible Body" sprayed on a home to a less official "9 Ward RIP," to evocative images of humanity's remnants underwater. Yes, there are some simple laments here that don't add much to what's already been said about New Orleans, though these are few and almost serve as a brief record of that genre of contemporary literature.

The best part about this Katrina writing is how quirky and unexpected it is. Lyrical, often funny, the second half of the issue even includes a science fiction story. From Moira Crone's "The Great Sunken Quarter": "September, 2132. The sun started to come up behind the clouds, turning the sky from pink to white, and then the Ponchart Sea was all silver. Port Gramercy shrank into a line on the horizon. The Islands of New Orleans were thirty miles distant, and not yet visible. We were headed for the greatest of the wonders there, the Sunken Quarter." Wry, witty, often angry edging toward bitterness, this Katrina-inspired art is decidedly postmodern, clearly distrustful of traditional forms, confrontational, impatient, and there is almost enough of a theme here to announce a new school. These lines, for example, from Elizabeth Gross' "Delta": "The video store is broken. I mean,/ closed for good, the tapes all sold,/ or else boxed up and taken home/ by those bird-eyed men who/ used to run the place." And this from Robin Kemp's "Body" on the facing page: "the Dumaine Street Bridge/ ...now it's snagged itself/ just another face-down man/ right there where I used to walk the dog." How about this little gem from Abraham Burickson's "Soft and Splinter": "She called to say she wasn't coming back/ ...to say that he could keep the fish, keep the television, the house,/ that Texas is a big ol' pile of rock/ and she's gonna stay..."

Then there's Andrei Codrescu. As Jeffrey Chan writes in the issue's penultimate essay -- a who's who of the recovering N.O. literary scene -- Codrescu is "the famous New Orleans author in some people's opinion ... one of New Orleans' literati and editor of a terminally hip pub called Exquisite Corpse. His distinctive Romanian accent can be heard on NPR ... I think he's in the Ozarks now. He's written several books ... including "Road Scholar," the mandatory haywire road trip book which takes him across this oh-so-kooky country. [I]t was quite a bore..."

Why is Chan taking shots at Codrescu? Admittedly, Codrescu's contribution to the issue was the only one of the more than 40 pieces that gave me real pause, because while I clearly am no fan of lament for lament's sake, flippancy doesn't seem appropriate at all. What was Codrescu up to in his poem "The Good Shepherdess of Nether," a Dadaist experiment that he wrote jointly with Dave Brinks? While Brinks' stanzas come across as searching for meaning in all of this, Codrescu's are more like the ADHD kid in the back of the class who clearly is in his own world, here again offering little more than confirmation of his well-known morbid fascination with bugs. Brinks begins: "when hurricane names reach/ the greek alphabet/ it takes us a long way away from the theory/ of original sin/ and the common housefly." Codrescu responds, "all the way to common sin/ of wishing it was not the way it is/ and the original fly/ did you ever see one this blue, Dave?" Chan closes his essay with a parting salvo at the eminent one, "As for you, Codrescu ... oh, whatever. You get published, get on the air, get to be the king of the freak parade, and slouch for Ferlinghetti. More power to you."

One New Orleans has passed, another begun. And if the writers are already sniping at each other, then the writers are returning to normalcy. Whatever dark or bright thing it will eventually be, the new New Orleans will find a normalcy as well. This remarkable issue of the New Orleans Review ends with an outward look, beyond the flooded city and its own black and nighttime cover, to the plight of the greater world in the new era of weather chaos. As Gisleson had written earlier in the collection, "In the hard blue fall sky two jet contrails had crossed each other, and for a moment it wasn't just our houses, or city but the whole sky, the world itself, marked for search and rescue."

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